Apple Warns of iWork.com Potential File Loss with Service Shutdown

Apple alerted users of its iWork.com public beta Tuesday morning that the service will shut down on July 31, 2012, and that any documents they have stored on the service will no longer be available after that date.

iWork.com was Apple’s public beta turned experiment in online document storage and syncing. The service never graduated from beta phase, and many of its features were eventually rolled into iCloud. With iCloud officially available, iWork.com’s days were numbered.

Apple is advising iWork.com users to sign in to their account and copy their files back to their computer ahead of July 31.

Apple first notified iWork.com users on March 9 that the service was shutting down and suggested they migrate their files to iCloud. While iCloud does offer document syncing for Apple’s iWork apps, it doesn’t support collaborative commenting like iWork.com.

Users looking for more information about the demise of iWork.com can check out Apple’s knowledge base article on the topic.

I just don’t understand why the plug is being pulled without a viable IOX replacement - are we to just assume there will be an iWork 12 coming with Mountain Lion? There’s a icon on the top of my Pages that says “Share” - but it’s just a tits on a boar now.